Faculty Programs

Envisioning, Exploring, and Shaping the Future Together

Disruptive ideas need to be nurtured. VMware collaborates with the world’s leading faculty to develop and incubate innovative research approaches, and to accelerate the transformation of ideas into world-class technology solutions.

Faculty Research Collaborations

Scholar-in-Residence

Systems Research Award

IT Academy Instructor Opportunities

Early Career Faculty Grants

Academic Software Licensing

Faculty Research Collaborations

VMware is committed to sponsoring academic research in areas of importance to the future of computing. Our support for faculty enables graduate student researchers and post-docs, and helps to cover the expenses involved in developing new technology in a university setting. Some recent faculty research collaborations include:

Arizona State University

Bar Ilan University

Brown University

Carnegie Mellon University

Cornell University

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

ETH Zürich

Georgia Institute of Technology

Imperial College London

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Politecnico di Torino

Princeton University

Stanford University

Technion

Tel Aviv University

Texas A&M University

University College London

University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Santa Cruz

University of Cambridge

University of Colorado at Boulder

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of Texas at Austin

University of Texas at Dallas

University of Utah

University of Washington

University of Wisconsin at Madison

VMware Systems Research Award

VMware’s annual Systems Research Award recognizes early career systems researchers who have made notable contributions to computer science systems research, and who demonstrate an outstanding level of innovation, academic research leadership, and industry impact with their work. The recognition includes a $100,000 gift to the researcher’s university in support of his/her research. Eligible faculty must be within five years of their first tenure-track appointment.

Tim Kraska is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Professor Kraska received the 2017 VMware Systems Research Award. He has been widely recognized for his early work on hybrid human-machine data management. On the systems side, his work includes a pioneering reference architecture (CrowdDB) for hybrid crowdsourced queries. He has continued to role-model a style of holistic systems treatment in his early research by formulating and tackling research problems that together represent a powerful new vision for the future of database systems.

Matei Zaharia is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Professor Zaharia received the 2016 VMware Systems Research Award. His accomplishments as a young researcher include developing the well-known and widely used open source projects Apache Spark, Apache Mesos, and Tachyon (now Alluxio). Zaharia’s academic work has received thousands of citations, and his software is being used by thousands of developers worldwide.

Early Career Faculty Grants

The Early Career Faculty Grant program is intended to recognize the next generation of exceptional faculty members. A gift to the researcher’s university is made in support of his/her research and to promote excellence in teaching. Early career faculty must be within five years of their first tenure-track appointment. Recent grants include:

Ding Yuan, University of Toronto

Bharath Raghavan, University of Southern California

Aurojit Panda, New York University

Aruna Balasubramanian, Stony Brook University

Taesoo Kim, Georgia Institute of Technology

Scholar-in-Residence

The Scholar-in-Residence (SiR) program brings together exceptional university faculty with VMware researchers for deeper collaboration over a specific time period. SiRs often takes place during a faculty member’s summer break or sabbatical year. Collaboration focuses on research objectives mutually defined in advance. Recent scholars include leading faculty from:

IT Academy Instructor Opportunities

Full- or part-time faculty members at eligible institutions can build their technical expertise and teach new technology skills as a VMware IT Academy instructor. See the VMware IT Academy pages for details.

Academic Software Licensing

VMware offers academic software licensing to educational institutions for teaching, research and personal discovery. (Software licensed for academic use cannot be used for campus infrastructure, non-academic purposes, or any for-profit activity.)